I was firmly going with Julie by Christmas of 1986, engaged even, when Kim sent this card from Washington, D.C., where she had taken a writer position with USA Today. She had no business suggesting a holiday get-together, but moreover I had no business not discouraging her.

Kim was a third-year reporter with the Port Huron Times Herald in the celebrated fall of 1984. Nearing my 26th birthday, I was six months into my first career job, doing community relations work for a Republican Michigan state senator. By this point we would plan a get-together every month or two, just to tear off each other’s clothing and spend a weekend in each other’s close company.

I faintly remember at the end of the most recent such weekend being hunched over the hood of her small, white car of an unremembered make trying to pry a drive belt back onto a drive pulley, sweat dripping onto the air filter compartment, and ripping my hand open on the engine block. I think I might still have the scar. Cutting the unloosed belt was not something I would even have thought of as a solution, then or or now.

I was living in the “Rock and Roll Household” with Keith W., Mike B., and the famous rock critic and future band front man, Mark R. D., (then a recent alumnus of the “knee-jerk” liberal Michigan State News) for whom Kim suggests George Will as a role model.

I am grateful that in my life I have been congratulated much more often for becoming a father than for not becoming one. But in 1984 (not ’83, as Kim absently datestamps) I certainly would not have felt so.